The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Noted Scholars Series (co-sponsored by Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies and the Department of English Language and Literatures) presents:
“Old Benjamin The Refugee”
Vinh Nguyen
WHEN & WHERE
Wednesday February 04, 2026
12-1pm
Buchanan Tower, Room 323
Please RSVP below in advance
A light lunch will be served at 1:00pm
Abstract:
This critical-creative (auto)ethnography reflects on my experience crossing the border between France and Spain, through the Pyrenees mountain, a treacherous migration route that philosopher Walter Benjamin—and countless other refugees—undertook in the 1940s as they fled Nazi persecution. I think through what it means to retrace another’s path, and connect this border crossing with my own position as a refugee of the Vietnam War and a scholar of critical refugee studies. I move from considering the exigency of Benjamin’s writing for contemporary refugee studies to a reading of my beloved late-friend Y-Dang Troeung’s memoir Landbridge to a meditation of knowledge and embodiment. In doing so, I illuminate the circuitous and complicated nature of refugee migration—that “refuge” or “(re)settlement” also requires an ongoing process of return to the past, to history, to the stories of oneself and of others.
About Dr. Vinh Nguyen
Vinh Nguyen is a writer and educator. He is the author of the speculative memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction, the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize, and the Toronto Book Award. His academic monograph Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience won Outstanding Achievement in Literary Studies from the Association for Asian American Studies and the American Studies Association’s Shelly Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies. He is working on a novel.
